Ron Smith: A Wingnut fights back

The latest issue of New Zealand Skeptic, features a major article by Michael Edmonds, entitled ‘Dealing with Wingnuts – which way to turn?’. It purports to be about the problem of communicating science to the layperson. It is, in fact, an arrogant and self-satisfied diatribe against those who have the temerity to disagree with him. Wingnuts, we are told, are political extremists, ‘unhinged activists’, ‘hardcore haters’, and paranoid conspiracy theorists’, who ‘propagate misinformation to confuse public understanding’. Clearly, they are persons who constitute a serious threat to society.

In the very first paragraph, Edmonds gives two examples of the sort of ‘wingnuttery’ he is talking about. One of these is resisting the challenge of ‘climate change’. I suppose he means by this, expressing doubt about the thesis that the planet faces a serious problem concerning anthropogenic global warming. I also suppose that he intends us to understand that persons that have such doubts, such as, for example, Associate Professor de Freitas at Auckland University and Dr de Lange at Waikato (as well as all members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition) are unhinged activists, etc... The 31,486 American scientists who recently established a website dedicated to this same proposition, presumably fall into the same category.